Only a few days left before the big trip to Florida. We are very busy doing last minute preparations: finishing up lab experiments, training, planning, and packing. Yesterday, we shipped 10 large boxes of equipment to Florida (a future post will show how I tried to put all 10 boxes in my little fiesta). We are bringing a lot of science to Aquarius and a little bit of me feels like we packed the whole Helmuth lab away to Florida.Packing for Mission 31 gave me a chance to look through all the equipment we have in the Helmuth Lab, and now I want to highlight some of the awesome instruments we use everyday (along with some we bought just for Mission 31).

My common arsenal of field gear: Don't under estimate reliability the duct tape and zip ties.

My favourite instrument in the lab is definitely the YSI EXO 2 sonde. Alli has already touched on what the sonde will be measuring in Florida, however the sonde can do so much more than just measure dissolved oxygen. In terms of water quality data loggers, the EXO 2 has the complete package with seven different sensors that measure nine parameters in the ocean (Temperature, Salinity, Depth, Chlorophyll, Blue-green algae, Turbidity, Dissolved organics, Dissolved oxygen and pH). If you only bring one oceanic monitoring instrument on your next research trip: make it the EXO 2 sonde.

The sonde fully loaded (left), The sonde under maintenance with sensors out (right)

Currently, there are only seven sensors that are compatible with the sonde. But as different types of sensors are developed (such as nutrient or wave sensors), we will be able to create different combinations of sensors for specific monitoring projects by just plugging them into the sonde.

Aside from the sonde being able to clean itself, the coolest part about this instrument is that it is fully bluetooth operated. We can go caveman style and plug the sonde to a computer through an usb cable, but why go wired when we can go wireless!

Calibrating the algae sensor...done!

Just swipe with a magnet next to the sonde and the bluetooth is turned on. The wireless connection can display live reading, schedule deployment, download data, sensors maintenance check, calibrate and so much more!

In the comfort of the lab, wireless verses cable might seem trivial. But when we are out in the field, in the heat or in the cold, being able to connect to loggers without cables goes a very long way. We will be seeing a lot more wireless loggers in the coming years, and I believe wireless loggers are the future in field data collection. The ease of wireless data collection will give us more live, up-to-date, and relevant data from the Earth's ever changing environments.

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THe nu Surface Team﻿

We are graduate students and faculty from the Marine Science Center at Northeastern University. We will be sharing our personal daily Mission 31 experiences here! Visit northeastern.edu/mission31 to learn more about who we are and about the science that we will be doing with Fabien during the second half of Mission 31.